JayB

More conceit, snobbery, and scarcely concealed disgust masquerading as a sincere concern for your the people that you've dedicated your life to fetishizing some idealized version of. To claim that the average person is so dim-witted that they've effectively been hypnotized by marketing and are no longer capable of defining their own *authentic* wants and needs, or that the choices that they make and the way that they actually live are contemptible and shameful, and that they need some coddled intellectuals to take control of their lives to save them from themselves represents a more optimistic view of human nature than the contrary is quite an assertion. This is nothing more than aristocratic contempt for the everything about the average person repackaged in a "progressive" wrapper. The funny thing about you is that I'd wager that the average working stiff with even a modestly skilled trade would find your concern as bizzare as your contempt is annoying, given that high probability that he's probably making substantially more money and profoundly happier with his lot in life than you are. However, I *strongly* encourage you to put your precepts to the test. Spend a couple of thousand hours on the factory floor or your choosing, take a dozen especially hapless victims of the consumer society under your wing. Pull them aside and - in as loud a voice as you can muster - subject their beliefs, their choices, and every other aspect of their lives to as withering a critique as you deem necessary to bring about the desired changes. A parlor-marxist version of Pygmalion played out on the assembly line, if you will. Let us know how it goes.

and of course you exclude yourself from this milieu, having transcended it with you revelations and awareness? Exactly where did I exclude myself? I assume, then, by your tone, that you completely disagree with what was stated above? Or it disturbed you, so you choose to attack the speaker instead of addressing the points? I should also add that you will probably enjoy David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest," which is a long and hilarious meditation on the anxieties that you expressed in your post. I read the book 10 years ago, and it seems kind of prophetic in hindsight.

and of course you exclude yourself from this milieu, having transcended it with you revelations and awareness? Exactly where did I exclude myself? I assume, then, by your tone, that you completely disagree with what was stated above? Or it disturbed you, so you choose to attack the speaker instead of addressing the points? You must have read DeTocqueville's "Democracy in America," correct? The aristocratic critiques and anxieties that he articulated (along with the positive comments) when surveying America in the mid-nineteenth century are more or less exactly in line with your comments, or at least substantially similar to them.

Again - who gets the blame for this? There are only so many capitalist titans in our society, their wants are limited, and their aggregate demand for goods and services are quite limited relative to that generated by the sum of the average workers. To cap the irony, most of them have made their fortunes by catering to the wants and desires of the NASCAR or McMansion sets more efficiently than any other participant in the marketplace. You can blame them for the gaudy fixtures in their Hamptons beach retreat, but not the Velvet Elvis poster above the Lazy-Boy recliner anchored in front of the flat-screen showing the latest UFC fight.

And who is to blame for this, kemosabe? See above. Wasn't a problem when the landed aristocracy provided the only effective demand for many goods and services, was it?

Rather odd to hear such a lament from the "one true friend of the working man on cc.com." The overwhelming majority of the resources and effort expended in a market economy are dedicated to providing the average citizen the goods and services that they want at the lowest possible price. The culture that you disdain and the purchases that occur within it are the product of choices that reflect the true motivations, wants, and desires of the average worker. The irony here is that your critiques resemble nothing more closely than those first articulated by the European artistocrats sneering at the mass-society growing across the Atlantic in the 19th century. Where there are exceptions to the tendency of the masses to shape our society, they are primarily due to the efforts and patronage of an elite that owes its position to capitalism rather than hereditary rule. How much time have you ever spent on a shop floor, production line, or job-site, btw? I'd estimate that I spent at least 3,000 hours working landscaping, production, and light assembly jobs between the start of high-school and the end of college. If there'd been a vote between watching NASCAR on the big screen while chugging down Bud-lights over a bowl of hot-wings at Hooters, and sipping chardonay while contemplating late 19th century American portraiture at a seminar hosted by a local art-museum -I hate to break this to you...but - Rembrandt Peale would have lost out to Dale Earnhardt every_single_time.

"There are no doubt some things available to the modern workman that Louis XIV himself would have been delighted to have—modern dentistry for instance. On the whole, however, a budget on that level had little that really mattered to gain from capitalist achievement. Even speed of traveling may be assumed to have been a minor consideration for so very dignified a gentleman. Electric lighting is no great boon to anyone who has enough money to buy a sufficient number of candles and to pay servants to attend them. It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort." Same as above.

"The man who has gone through a college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work." -JS

It's worth noting the second peak of Alt-A and Option ARM reset that hits in 2010-12. I suspect that the pay-option peak will actually hit a bit sooner than the chart would suggest, since the percentage of pay-option borrowers who are adding deferred interest to their balances each month isn't small. I think most of those loans automatically reset to a significantly higher rate when the balance equals ~115% of the original loan value, and the "pay-option" feature goes away. The reset problem isn't going anywhere, and will be hitting a different sector of borrowers when it rolls around. Hopefully all of the people in the second hump were qualified at the fully amortizing rate.

So basically you're suggesting that this be dumped on future generations to pay back. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23241606 A future crisis in the making is retirement. Social Security will continue to shrink. With the change from Defined Benefit programs (pensions) to Defined Contribution programs (401k), individuals will have less money, as it turns out that they are poor investors, have bad choices (high expenses), or simply opt out of the programs and save little or nothing at all. In a few years, poor retirees will be clamoring for the govt to *do something*. Aside from all of the other subsidies tossed in the personal housing trough, the taxpayers are already bailing out borrowers by eliminating the tax on the debt balances forgiven by banks in short sales. I suspect that this is only the beginning. With regards to 401(k)'s, it seems like moving from opt-in to the opt-out model and tossing all of the money into a retirement date fund is the way to go for the large number of people who are in control of their retirement assets but can't define the difference between stocks and bonds...

Let's focus on your capacity to support your central claim here, then broaden our focus. When that's finished, you can make the argument that gerrymandering and the electoral college render either any sitting president or Bush incapable of critiquing any aspect of any election in any other country.

My argument is not that you are the only one who has made such claims. The first argument is that if *you* or any other average citizen are aware of them, they are quite public. It follows, then, that neither your claims nor the evidence that they are ostensibly based upon are unavailable for examination by anyone who wishes to do so. If this is the case, everyone in the country with either a motive or the authority to act upon them is also aware of them - yet...nothing has happened. The burden of proof, logic, and plain sanity rests on your shoulders here. Explain how this is possible. What "political reasons" could the democrats possibly have for not uncovering blatant rigging of the presidential election? What's the downside? How do you explain the press's apparent reticence here? Also - you might not have caught this earlier, but what response do you have to the fact that the comments made by Diebold's CEO in his capacity as a party official were issued on a public fundraising letter, widely distributed through the US mail? Is stating one's intention to rig an election in public the mark of a canny conspirator capable of pulling an elaborate plot of this magnitude and keeping it quiet for four years? This is straight-up insanity here amigo.

So why this business about me arguing against statements that you haven't made? Where is the proof? Any party that had any *inkling* of such conduct by their opponents both the motive and the means to dedicate massive resources to investigating such an incident, ditto for any publication that even dabbles in investigative journalism? If an average citizen like you has free access to damning factual evidence, how is it that no one with any authority to act has noticed, and why haven't they acted on it? This would make any political sandal in history inconsequential by comparison. What gives? As far as gerrymandering is concerned, it's clearly a defect in my opinion. How, in your opinion, does the fact that partisan majorities in state legislatures use the rules to redraw the lines of electoral districts in a manner that favors their interests preclude American presidents from articulating critiques of elections in other nations? Does this go for all presidents, or just Bush?

And just in case you are tempted to hesitate for a moment at the border... http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2008/02/the_archbishop_of_canterbury_w/allcomments.html

The irony of this statement coming from a self-described Marxist is so staggering that it has a kind of grandeur to it...

who the hell walks around climbing areas with a camera and snaps close-ups of strangers? and then posts them on an internet forum? sounds to me about one step away from an upskirt photography. Van Driesen wants you to find your center...

"He's disempowering the misandrists by appropriating their term of abuse for his own purposes.."

I am glad that you agree that: 1)Both parties are guilty of using gerrymandering to suit their own purposes. 2)There is no credible evidence to suggest that electronic voting have been rigged to distort the vote count in any recent presidential election. regarding #2, whatever the "evidence" is, why not not get rid of electronic voting till it can be made transparent and opensource? until it is so i will always distrust the results (except of course when they are in my favor ) I have no problem reverting to optical scanning, for example, but Matt hasn't been going on about the technical merits of one voting technology in the four-year-long-monomaniacal-insinuatathon...

What specific defects in our elections are you referring to here, and which proven defects would pertain exclusively to Bush? Is this all about the gerrymandering of congressional districts? This practice disqualifies any president of the US from criticizing anything that goes on in any election in any country at any time?

I am glad that you agree that: 1)Both parties are guilty of using gerrymandering to suit their own purposes. 2)There is no credible evidence to suggest that electronic voting have been rigged to distort the vote count in any recent presidential election.

Okay. I suggest you look up the etymology of the term, then speculate about whether this is a unique failing of either our time or any particular party. If it's neither, then one might expect it to disappear from the usual conspiro-litany you direct against the Republicans.

So that justifies redrawing the voting districts to shut the other party out, contracting with a private company who says they are going to make voting machines that will deliver the votes to your side and then refusing to address complaints about how it looks as if they did exactly that, or interfering with access to the polls in the other party's stronghold districts? That justifies accepting the word of the voting machine company who says they can't make a machine that produces a paper receipt when they make bank machines that do that flawlessly and which - by the way - are much more "hackproof?" I don't know whether fair elections would favor which party, but are you arguing that we shouldn't try? No insinuations based on the statement in the public fundraising letter here. Yet again, we apparently have an open and damning conspiracy that *no one* in Congress or elsewhere has seized on...for some inexplicable reason. If the Democrats had reason to believe that this actually happened, and credible evidence to back up an investigation - they'd sit on their hands? This would make Watergate look like cheating at a church bingo game, bring down the administration, and inflict lasting damage on the Republican party but... Come-ondude. Put down the partisan crack-pipe.

If no one has put forth this argument, from where did the practice of drawing congressional boundaries along racial lines come from? A statistical quirk? You don't think that this process could be used as a backhanded way to secure either a majority Democrat or Republican district?

Matt: Are you sure that the CEO of Diebold wasn't speaking in his capacity as Republican Party Chairman (or whatever party chair that he held) concerning their efforts to get out the vote in his state, since the statement that you are basing your case on appeared in a *fund-raising letter*? "Hello: Here is part one of my diabolical, top-secret conspiracy to subvert the democratic process, that I will henceforth detail in this public letter...."

I think that has been a stated reason for it in some instances. However, I'd venture a guess that some more neutral form of general redistricting would still result in there being districts dominated by black voters, hispanics, various Asian populations, or for that matter Mormons. Are you categorically opposed to gerrymandering, or is this a suitable rationale for redrawing the boundaries of Congressional districts?